When
the first game in your series is already titled “Return to Mysterious
Island” what do you name your sequel? “Re-return to Mysterious
Island”? “Many Happy Returns to Mysterious Island”?
How about “Sharp U-Turn to Mysterious Island”? Well, Microids
settled upon the inelegant if inevitable “Return to Mysterious
Island 2.” Depending on where you look, they sometimes add the
subtitle “Mina’s Fate.” The first game already had
a “Return” in the heading because it was itself a sequel
of sorts to the Jules Verne novel of 1874, “The Mysterious Island.”

Verne is the guy who not
only basically invented science fiction, but was the original tech
nerd. He loved gadgets back at a time (the late 19th century) when
steam power still had a wow factor. Okay, so Verne has a huge success
with “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and a number of years
later he pens, what else? A sequel. Yes, “The Mysterious Island,”
among other things, is a sequel to “Leagues.” Therefore,
RtMI2 is a sequel to RtMI1 which is a sequel to “The Mysterious
Island” which is a sequel to “20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea.” Got all that?

I
haven’t played the first “Return to Mysterious Island”
but I know from checking the website, as well as from watching the
RtMI2 intro, that it follows the modern-day exploits of a young adventurer
named Mina who gets stranded on Verne’s île mystérieuse.
RtMI2 continues a split second after the end of the first game. I
mean, Mina is back on that dang island bang just like that. So, what
else would an intrepid adventure game hero like her do? She starts
trying to get off the island again. This time, though, she’s
already got her loyal simian sidekick Jep. In fact, Jep’s billing
has gone up in RtMI2. He’s a good half of the game, which is
to say you play Mina about half the time and Jep the other half. The
situation on the island has changed, however. This time, Mina has
to get off in a hurry; either that or figure out a way to keep the
mountain from erupting. Or, I guess, re-erupting. The island was completely
obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the end of Verne’s novel,
but who’s counting?

Gameplay in RtMI2 consists
of you, as either Mina or Jep, but mostly as Mina with Jep perched
on Mina’s shoulder, roaming around the island trying to make
use of all the stuff that everybody else stranded on the island before
you has built — in some cases, eons ago. For an invisible island
way out in the Pacific hundreds of miles from civilization, this place
sure has been busy. First, there was that alien, or maybe not an alien,
named “X” who constructed all his quasi-mystical machinery.
Why? Who knows! Then Captain Nemo and the Nautilus showed up. Then
the five Civil War era Yankees landed, blown astray in a balloon.
And, finally, Mina arrives. Twice! The joint is positively littered
with brick kilns and moonshine stills and laser cannons and strange
portals and you name it.

And
who would have it any other way? After all, what is an adventure game?
It’s a kid having the run of a giant toy store. Hey! Look at
that! How does that work? Where does this go? What happens if I push
this? RtMI2 is chock full of stuff to look at and ponder and poke
at and try to figure out. Good adventure games also have colorful
characters. Mina is indeed the only living human on this island, but
that doesn’t mean it’s not full of wild, interesting characters.
There are robots, there are disembodied voices and there are monkeys.
Barrels full. Mostly it’s Jep who encounters these fellow apes.
Simian conversations are carried out in grunts and pictograms, but
you quickly get the idea.

One thing this game has,
in spades, is inventory. Oh, baby. Mina and Jep start the game with
a shared inventory screen with, I kid you not, 196 available slots.
In fact, much of the gameplay of RtMI2 consists of managing and reconfiguring
this vast inventory. The game also has a fair sprinkling of that adventure
craze-du-jour, the minigame. Either Mina or Jep must perform some
action within a certain time frame or confined space. One, for instance,
has Mina fishing in the lake and landing flounders of varied sizes.
I still don’t understand the appeal of minigames, but I don’t
really mind them either. Also, there’s a handy “easy”
button alongside most of these challenges, if you want to bail. Of
course, it’ll cost you “coping” points.

Coping
points is just one of several RPG-like elements in the game, mostly
in the inventory screen. Both Mina and Jep have their own health bars,
which at certain times have to be at their maximum to perform an action.
Also there’s a “pride” bar. The more times you play
a minigame in easy mode, the more this bar shrinks. There are also
“friendship” bars over the heads of the monkeys Jep encounters.
Jep has to either appease, cajole or threaten these apes if he wants
to get anything from them, or to get past them. The coping points
are displayed on a number counter, which gives you your score, a la
Sierra Online, upon the successful completion of the game. Be forewarned
that you can die in RtMI2. Hint: don’t grab any live electrical
wires with your bare hands, or bare paws.

Another thing good adventure
games have is wide-eyed exploration. RtMI2 uses some kind of 360-degree
nodal system. You click hotspots to advance to the next panoramic
node. But these panoramas are quite gorgeous, and quite active. Waves
are moving, birds are flying, fire is crackling, clouds are scudding.
The scenes were, to my eye, remarkably realistic. The game is played
in first person perspective, except for cutscenes, with a picture
of Mina, Jep or both in the lower left corner of the screen. The island
in many spots is quite beautiful and you may find yourself stopping
on a shoreline or two just to admire the vista. The game employs the
time-honored device of starting you off in a certain area and then
opening up more real estate as you progress. The cutscenes are rendered
in “action” comic book style. This too is a current adventure
game craze. No doubt it owes its popularity to reduced production
costs, but I for one find it a more than acceptable convention.

The
puzzles are a varied lot. Which is good. In addition to the minigames
and the inventory-fest there are a few fixed-screen logic challenges
scattered about, as well as some purely mechanical devices to get
working. The logic puzzles do not have an “easy” button.
Which I applaud. They’re not especially difficult, but if you
don’t glom onto the “trick” of each you might be
staring at them for quite a while. In fact, the hardest part of these
puzzles as well as the other mechanical devices you’ll be trying
to operate is figuring out just how they do operate. Also, Mina and
Jep have unique strengths and weaknesses which factor into much of
the gameplay. One other RPG-ish thing you have to keep in mind is
the physical “state” of Mina and Jep, as represented by
their inventory images. Some puzzles depend upon this. While there’s
no serious pixel-hunting, I did have trouble spotting a few hotspots.
Largely this was due, I suspect, to my widescreen LCD monitor.

RtMI2 is one of the most
non-linear games I’ve ever played. At one point I’d been
playing for two days when it dawned on me that I hadn’t made
a lick of real progress. There is so much to do with the inventory
and the machines and other things scattered about that you can play
for quite a while, earning points all the time, and still get absolutely
nowhere, plotwise. I had to stop on a couple of occasions and think,
okay, but just how do I get to the next area? There is a main plot,
but the island has a remarkable amount of side quests. Most of these
do have a tangential connection to the overall story, but, again as
in an RPG, you can run around jacking up your score by doing everything
you can think of.

The
game has appropriate, even helpful sound effects and the music is
quite nice. It’s lyrical when it should be and insistently dramatic
when it should be. The voice acting is expert. Mina is the only human
but the robots and chimps sound convincing, too. The relationship
between Mina and Jep is particularly well acted, adding a genuine
poignancy to the otherwise exotic proceedings. One special sound note:
there is a certain musical instrument in the game that both Jep and
Mina have to learn to play. The instrument is quite rudimentary and
I consider myself reasonably literate musically, but darned if this
thing didn’t give me fits at times. If you are particularly
tin-earred or otherwise sound-challenged, you might make note of this.

There were things I didn’t
like about “Return to Mysterious Island 2.” But not many.
I didn’t like the dying. Even though the game simply puts you
back at the start of the trouble. But what is gained by dying in a
game? To me, it’s a silly, pointless device. I would have liked
a richer selection of screen resolutions. I’m starting to get
tired of playing games in which all the characters look 60 pounds
overweight. I also wasn’t crazy about the ending. You’re
presented with a momentous choice, but it too, like the dying, feels
trumped up. Just have an exciting, slam-bang ending and send everyone
home happy. RtMI2 also has two “special” features, both
of which you will be prompted to set up (or not) during the game installation.
The first is an integration with the iPod Touch or iPhone that allows
you to export the minigames and then reimport them – if, that
is, you own an iPod Touch or iPhone. The second is a form of internet
chat that lets you interact with your pals while playing. I availed
myself of neither of these. There are many, many things I enjoy doing
with other people. Playing adventure games is not one of them. Internet
chat during an adventure game to me would be like trying to line up
a golf shot while my pal was slapping me on the back and asking me
if I wanted a brewski.

I
downloaded my game from the Microids website. There were three files,
two of them gargantuan, and the website wisely recommends you use
a download manager. I, of course, ignored this sound advice, but luckily
got away with it. The total download came to roughly two and a half
gigabytes. The game installed on my PC running Windows 7 Release Candidate
1 without event, but I did have trouble getting the game itself to
start. When I went to the game exe’s properties panel and switched
to Vista compatibility I had no further troubles. (Now there’s
a first!) I’m not certain about the game’s availability
on DVD (or CD). Which in any case seems to be an option fast disappearing
from the scene. As is so often the case nowadays, the game was obviously
translated into English, in this instance from French. At least with
a Jules Verne story this is apropos. The game has remarkably few typos,
and only a couple of head-scratcher translations (just what is an
“avid” rodent, anyway?) though the French labels and other
in-game documents were left as is. The main problem with translations
is that the original idiom, if any, is lost. That is, characters tend
to speak in flat standard English instead of colorful jargon. Which
makes me wonder what a game like “Sam and Max” must sound
like translated into French. “Zut alors, petite lapin ami!”

Microids
has made a minor industry of mining the Verne catalog for these “updated”
homage games. In addition to RtMI1 and 2 they’ve pumped out
a game called “Voyage” that is apparently a mashup of
“From the Earth to the Moon” and “Journey to the
Center of the Earth”; and a game of “20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea” titled “The Secret of the Nautilus.” Why
Microids feels compelled to modernize these stories is a mystery to
me, but I’m not complaining. Is there an author better suited
to the adventure game than Jules Verne? Not on this planet.

It took me about 25-30
hours to complete “Return to Mysterious Island 2.” The
game started slowly, due mostly to the learning curve needed to master
that complex inventory, but it wasn’t long before I was sucked
in. RtMI2 is not a groundbreaking adventure game, but it does do most
things quite well, and it has amazingly few faults. Best of all, it
lets you wander around “experimenting” better than any
other game I can think of. It is commercial game production at pretty
much its highest mark. It is also an adventure game that actually
understands what’s fun about adventure games. While I could
live without the iPhone product placement and the black “failed”
screens, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay on Mysterious Island and I can
think of no good reason not to award the game an overall grade of
A.

System Requirements:

• Processor: 1Ghz Pentium
  III
• Memory: 256 MB RAM
• Video: 64 MB DirectX
  9-compatible graphics video card
• Audio: DirectX 9-compatible
  sound card
• Compatibility: Windows
  2000/XP/Vista